Google Play Launches Line of Discounted Textbooks - PC Magazine

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• August 9, 2013 04:28pm EST

College is all fun and games, until you try to lift that 20-pound bag of textbooks. But Google wants to lend a hand.
The Web giant is joining the e-textbook revolution, this week rolling out a new Google Play feature for purchasing and renting digital textbooks.
Students can visit the Books section of the mobile store to find a long list of publishing partners and a comprehensive selection of higher-education titles, with everything from science to math to history to English.
"With digital textbooks, there's no need to worry about which ones you have with you and which ones you left in your dorm room," Scott Dougall, director of product management at Google, wrote in a blog entry. "Because your library is stored in the cloud, you have instant access to the titles you need — when you need them — on your Android tablet, phone, iOS device, and on the Web."
Now, your textbooks weigh only as much as the device you're reading them on, and are as portable as your smartphone or tablet.
Plus, by renting books through Google Play, students can hang on to the text for only a semester or two, then return it at the end of six months, saving up to 80 percent compared to physical books, and eliminating the frustration of trying to sell textbooks back to the campus store.

And you can forget ripped pages, scribbled-in margins, and inappropriate drawings inside the book covers. With e-books, users can search the entire tome, bookmark chapters and pages, highlight and annotate passages, and get quick access to dictionaries, translation tools, Wikipedia, and Google search, then pass along the clean text to the next user at the end of the year.
Google is certainly earning its educational stripes this year. In May, the company unveiled Google Play for Education, designed to help teachers discover apps built specifically for K-12 students. The system is organized by subject matter and grade level, making it easy to find math apps appropriate for kindergarteners, for example.
The app, which has partnered with the likes of NASA and PBS, among others, will launch this fall.
Google has some competition, though, from newbie Boundless, which this week launched its first full suite of content options. Boundless users can now access textbooks anywhere, at any time, with a Mac laptop, iPad, or iPhone, plus a $19.99 subscription to the service.
Boundless books, however, are simply tomes curated by professors and PhDs, then vetted by experts before hitting the virtual shelves; they may not match your professor's requirements exactly, but provide what the company promises is a "personalized and enjoyable learning experience without an insane price tag."